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Provides: Higher quality speaking voices for synthesized speech
Developer: Cepstral
Requirements: Mac OS X
Retail Price: $29.99 per voice

The various voices provided on the Mac range from the OK to silly, and they'll work in a pinch. But if you want or need to listen to your computer, you may want a change. To provide this change, the Cepstral company can provide up to 10 US English voices (with 2 British voices) to satisfy most needs.

Since the very early years of the Macintosh, the Mac could speak. It was lots of fun to type text, select the text, and then have your computer speak of impossible acrobatic activities that you'd like your supervisor to do to themselves. For some reason it was always funnier to here these anecdotes from your computer.

Besides the amusement factor, having your computer speak can be helpful to downright necessary. For those with eyesight problems, or when it is not physically possible to read due to driving or operating a machine, the ability for a human voice to provide the link between computer and the human can range from boon or full fledged need.

To access your Mac's "inner voice," go to your System Preferences and select "Speech."

From there, select the second tab, "Text to Speech." Here is where you select the default voice, the speaking rate, and how the voice can be used. For example, you can have it speak the various Mac alerts, when an application needs your attention (if the icons bouncing in the Dock are not annoying enough), or to speak selected text (via a key command).

To give you an idea of what your current Mac speak is like, I had my Mac speak the following statement:

This is [name of voice] talking. I want to let you know that Applelinks is a great web site and has the best reviews.

Reading this line, here is a sample male voice, Bruce (.mov), and a female voice, Victoria (.mov). I picked these two because I feel they are the best sounding voices from which one can select.

And to show you how things have improved, reading the line here are Cepstral David (.mov) and Cepstral Diane (.mov).

Things are still not perfect with these voices, but one of the big problems is the English language. For example, take the sentence "Will you read this book to me? I have not read it before." Here, a word that is spelled the same is pronounced two different ways depending on how it shows up in a sentence. Because we have been taught for many years how to read these kinds of things, we do not think for a moment that we say "reed" and then "red." Interestingly enough, the Mac's voices say "reed" and "reed" while the Cepstral's voices say "red" and "red." Great? Yes. Brilliant? No. The Ceylons are not here yet.

As a minimum, one may chose to use these voices for system sounds and the like, but for me, the greatest use is for speaking out the text of books when using "I Speak It," part of the bundled package "The Boom Box" from Roxio Software. Here is my review of The Boom Box. Scroll down until you find the section on I Speak It for more information.

Personally I find computer woman's voices not as pleasant to listen to as the male voices. There tends to be more "clicking" noises between words and an occasional raspiness, especially with "S" sounds. However, what one finds appealing with voices is so subjective that you really need to listen on your own. [Some people find a raspy woman's voice sexy, I start to smell the cigarette once I hear such a voice. Not sexy. It's all subjective.]

In short, if you have a need and/or a want to listen to your computer talking, and you are not a fan of any of the default voices, you probably should look into the Cepstral voices. They are good. Let me also point out that if you purchase Roxio's "The Boom Box," you will get a coupon good for $15 (50%) off of one Cepstral voice. This is a good deal.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.